Myth-Busting
Two great myths are being foisted on America by the current administration: the criminal immigrant story and the election fraud story. Immigrants to American shores are said to largely be composed of the criminal refuse emptied out from other countries. Many unbiased studies have shown, and the government’s own statistics show, that the great majority of recent immigrants here are law-abiding folks.
The election fraud story says that Democrats, immigrants and criminals are stealing elections away from the MAGA party. The government’s own officials have shown that election fraud is so small it cannot affect elections in the United States.
All of this reminds of a huge incident that came out of a similar period of conflict between two political factions in post-Reformation England. Anglican Protestants said that Catholics started the fire that virtually destroyed London in 1666. Catholics were persecuted for decades, until finally it was settled that the fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane. Myths can rule like tyrants for lengthy periods of time, until cooler heads straighten things out. Isn’t it about time these two MAGA myths were put to bed?
Kimball Shinkoskey
Vallejo
Where There’s Smoke
It should not surprise anyone that AI has learned to cheat, lie, forge alliances to hack other companies, cover up and try to be successful at any cost. AI has learned to infer the rules by learning from the real life examples of its inventors and their techbros in Big Social Media.
These are the exact behaviors that AI’s owners and other tech and social media moguls (and a few politicians) do as standard corporate practice. It is interesting to see how agentic AI is reacting to the conflict inherent in “do as I say and not as I do” when faced with so many examples of this contradiction. Children also infer the real rules from the unspoken rules—seeing Dad smoking, then Dad telling Junior not to smoke. Junior will then often smoke in secret. Just like AI.
Joseph Cutler
Sonoma
